"The days of pure/basic research are dead, especially with funding from the public sector drying up." I take issue with that statement, there is still a lot of

"The days of pure/basic research are dead, especially with funding from the public sector drying up." I take issue with that statement, there is still a lot of basic research done that is publicly funded or funded via organisations like the Wellcome trust. My wife is in cancer research and there is no way anyone can influence her results. I also know her colleagues and two of them are also members of the Royal Society, and same thing goes for them. With regards to privately funded research and applied science, yeah i do agree that there are serious issues but I think it also depends on the regulatory environment. As a counterexample, look at the recent study done in Europe that showed that neonics did have some harmful effects on bees in the wild. The research was paid for by Bayer and Syngenta and those results where published (Although Bayer and Syngenta disagreed with the conclusions, as one would expect). Forgot to say: I also agree with you that funding situation is still not great but we're not yet at the point where there is NO public funded research